


Duet for Piano and Violin

by Zauzat



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-28
Updated: 2012-08-28
Packaged: 2017-11-13 01:50:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/498113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zauzat/pseuds/Zauzat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Sherlock's death, John brings Mycroft Sherlock's violin compositions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Duet for Piano and Violin

"Dr Watson. What can I do for you?"

Mycroft regarded the doctor who stood in the entrance hall of his Bayswater home, one hand curled around the head of his cane, the other clutching a number of sheets of paper. While he waited for a response, he absently noted the changes, the sandy hair with more grey strands than before, the body gaunt beneath the baggy jumper. They had only met once since John had confronted Mycroft over his role in Sherlock's downfall and that had been at the funeral where John had ostentatiously cut Mycroft dead. 

"You only took the violin," said John abruptly. Mycroft raised one eyebrow in enquiry.

"Of all Sherlock's things, you only took the violin," he continued. "I've been tidying stuff up, bit by bit. There's only so much I can take at one go, you know?" 

Mycroft nodded neutrally. He knew John had finally moved back into 221b Baker Street, Mycroft having quietly paid up the rent for quite some time to come.

"Anyway, I found these." John waved the sheets of paper at Mycroft. "Sherlock's compositions. I never learnt to read music, despite my half-hearted efforts with the clarinet. There is nothing I can do with these but I couldn't bear to just throw them out. I thought you might want them." He thrust the hand-written scores abruptly at Mycroft, as if it pained him to give them up.

"Thank you, John. That is a kind gesture." Mycroft continued to wait as John fidgeted uncomfortably, clearly still having something he needed to say. 

"He did three things with that violin of his," John continued eventually, addressing a point just to the left of Mycroft's shoulder. "Sometimes he just tortured it, or more accurately tortured the rest of us with it. God knows what he got out of it, maybe he was eliminating demons in his head by vocalising them. Who the hell knows? Sometimes he'd play pieces I recognised, pieces I liked. Bach or Vivaldi. It was only later, once I fully appreciated how much he despised what he called elevator music for idiots, that I realised he was playing them for me, because he knew I liked them."

John run his hand over his face and through his hair. Mycroft noted the fine tremble in the fingers. "I often hear snatches of those pieces in shops or on the radio. It hurts, but it's kind of comforting too, an echo of him, or of what he gave me. But then there was the third thing. It would happen in the early hours of the morning, often a day or two after finishing a case, when he was off the first high, but hadn't yet sunk back into boredom. 

"For the longest time I thought he was just playing snatches of things I didn't know. I got annoyed because he seemed to go over the same ground again and again, making odd changes. But eventually I realised that he was composing, experimenting with different phrasing. I'd come down in the morning to find music sheets scattered across the floor, covered in his scratchy writing. I came to recognise bits of it, to begin to follow the process of creating it. It was comforting eventually, to lie there half asleep in the middle of the night and let it echo into my dreams. I came to think he composed when he was happy, or at least content in himself."

John stared down miserably at his shoes. "And I'll never hear it again. Ever. It's stupid things like that, you know, that really get to me. That music is gone, forever. Like him." John brushed his hand angrily over his eyes. "Anyway. Whatever. I just thought you might like it. I need to go."

John had his hand on the door handle when Mycroft found himself speaking, surprising himself as the words tumbled out. "I could play it for you. If you want. On the piano of course. I don't play the violin."

John turned back to stare at him in surprise. Mycroft immediately realised the inappropriateness of his offer. "It won't sound the same, obviously. It won't be the same. Please, forget I ever mentioned it. It is not--"

"I'd like that." John's voice broke across his attempts to backpedal. "And sounding different is probably a good thing. Can we do that now?"

Mycroft showed him the way through the house, glancing quickly over the music as he walked, trying to quell a rising panic. He knew impulsive offers were never a good idea. It was one of the key rules of diplomacy, after all. No matter how spontaneous a offer might seem, it had always been scripted in advance. There would be consequences for this little performance and they were unlikely to be pleasant ones. What had possessed him?

He guided John into a small room at the back of house, generously illuminated by big bay windows. "A piano room. Complete with grand piano," muttered John to himself as Mycroft gently lifted the key cover. "Of course. How could I have expected anything less?"

Mycroft scanned once again through the pages covered with Sherlock's chicken scrawl. Many of them were filled with fragments and he put those to one side, piecing together a set from what remained that seemed to make up a reasonably coherent whole. Once he had them in order and placed on the music stand, he stared tensely at the notations. It was all quintessential Sherlock, emotional, exaggerated, hyperbolic, full of ridiculous changes of tone and pace. Exactly the sort of thing he had always hated playing. 

He tried to push the sense of it out of his mind, and concentrate on simply playing the right notes. At least in technical ability, he was sure of his ground. The sooner begun, the sooner this would be over. Some ten minutes later he let the music fade to silence. 

"That..., wow! That sounded very different but... God, you're good. That's concert level playing, isn't it?" Mycroft listened grimly to John's honest admiration. Was that what Sherlock had always found so appealing about the man?

"It was abysmal," said Mycroft drily. "Sherlock would be rolling his grave." He laughed without humour, caught in the irony of the little joke John wouldn't understand. "Technically I do indeed approach a professional standard, but, as my piano teacher made very clear to me at the age of fifteen, I was never going to good enough. I play with mechanical perfection, but utterly without emotional artistry. Sherlock could get more feeling out of his violin at the age of eight than I could from the piano after a decade of training."

"Yeah, well, I expect that was all crap," said John fiercely. "From what I've worked out, Sherlock got told some right rubbish as a kid, and then managed to internalise it. All that sociopath crap, he sunk to meet the expectations of adults who couldn't be bothered to try and reach out to him, just because he was different. None of my business, I know, but you can't have had much fun as a kid either. Maybe they were doing the same thing to you."

Mycroft turned to look at John in surprise. "I was certainly glad to be done with being a child. If my school days had been a measure of what were to be the best days of my life, I'd have--" He cut himself off. Perhaps not sensitive to mention killing oneself in this man's company. 

"Play it again," ordered John. "Your teacher's long gone. Sherlock's not here to do his oneupmanship thing. Stop trying to make it perfect. Just play it."

To his surprise, Mycroft found himself turning back to the piano and preparing to play. Was that another of the traits that had so entranced Sherlock? That steady authority that could cut straight through the games the Holmes family had always delighted in. 

Taking a deep breath, he closed his eyes. He could play a piece by memory after a single performance. He looked into the darkness of his own mind, conjuring up an image of Sherlock in his blue silk dressing gown, standing by the window in his Baker Street living room, violin tucked under his chin. He let the imagined sound of Sherlock's instrument slowly fill his mind, like water collecting in a rock pool, until it overflowed and cascaded down through his fingers onto the piano keys. 

It was not an unmitigated success. There were times when the pacing got into a tangle, times when he winced as he lost the rhythm altogether. There were soaring flights of fancy which he simply couldn't bring to life, all he could manage was to cling to the correct fingering and try to get through the sequence.

But there were entire passages where it worked. Where he was no longer standing outside of himself, listening critically to his technical control, but was living inside the music, feeling it surge right through him from the violin in his head to the piano at his fingertips.

"Now that was fantastic!" proclaimed John as they both sat in the silence of the aftermath. "And it did sound like Sherlock's playing, except that it didn't." He laughed at himself. "Well, music criticism was never going to be one of my skills, but I kind of mean it sounded like a somewhat more sane version of Sherlock." 

John was sitting forward on his chair, elbows on his knees, regarding Mycroft curiously. "Is that what you are? A saner version of Sherlock? I could never work out if the two of you were totally different or eerily similar."

Mycroft turned back to the piano, idly fingering through some of the fragments of music contained on the other pages while he gathered his thoughts together. "Sherlock would be horrified to know you saw any similarities. He loved to believe us to be utterly different. But loath through he'd be to admit it, there are character traits we share - we shared."

"Sherlock never spoke about his childhood, but the few hints he left suggested it wasn't very happy..." 

Mycroft watched his fingers sliding over the keys, thousands of hours of practise making the process almost autonomous of his conscious mind. He recognised a leading question when he heard one. He'd already committed unforgivable sin by playing Sherlock's composition. He might as well keep going. 

"Our home life was.... difficult." Mycroft let the music soothe his nerves, let it mask his telling of secrets that had never been voiced. He spoke to the piano, carefully forgetting about his audience. He'd spoken silently to his piano often enough in his childhood, through hundreds of long sad hours of practise. This wasn't that different. 

"Father married for money and social advancement, and found too late that the reason the family were prepared to let him in was that he was the best they could hope for for their emotionally fragile daughter. I suspect he'd all but given up on her before I was born. And then she produced two sons for him, disturbingly intelligent, verbally precocious, socially awkward..." 

Mycroft let his fingers speak for long moments, letting the music wash away the emotion. "Let's just say the existence of Sherlock and myself did nothing to improve the marriage. We both saw very little of our father during our childhood. Once he'd spent everything he could access, everything not protected by Mummy's trust fund, he moved to America. And good riddance, frankly.

"Mummy spent most of our childhood in bed," he continued. "Nowadays she'd doubtless be medicated and in therapy, but neither her family nor her social circles would ever have tolerated such crass intervention by outsiders. I suspect I was born with an overdeveloped sense of responsibility," said Mycroft with a sigh. "I spent the first years of my life trying to look after Mummy and failing dismally. Nothing I could do seemed to fix her. By the time Sherlock arrived I'd had to accept that she was just too big a task for me to manage. Sherlock seemed a more appropriate size for my eight years."

He offered John a tight smile. "It sounds flippant but it was true in a way. Father didn't even bother to turn up for the birth, Mummy shut her bedroom door on the baby and the nanny was more interested in tippling in the pantry with our housekeeper. No one else was volunteering to take care of Sherlock. I took it very seriously, went to the bookshop in the village with my pocket money and bought a copy of the childcare bible of the time, Dr Spock's _The Common Book of Baby and Child Care_." He smiled wryly when John spluttered with surprised laughter. "All those exhortations to mothers to trust their common sense. I remember wondering if it applied to big brothers too."

"I'm sure even then you trusted your common sense," commented John.

"True. But it doesn't mean I got it right, or that common sense was what Sherlock needed. I didn't like prep school but I survived easily enough, dissembling in ways that made me appear to fit in. But by the time Sherlock was three or four, I was realising that he would never agree to such deception. He was too passionate, too expressive, too convinced that he was right about everything, to be prepared to compromise in that way. I was always trying to curb his behaviour, not to change him - although I know that's what he thought was going on - but to try and protect him from what I knew lay ahead of him."

Mycroft lapsed into silence, lost in memories of what had come next. 

"Seeing as we're doing a little honest talking," said John, the amusement gone from his voice, "I've no respect for whoever told Sherlock he was a sociopath. But I don't think much of telling him that caring is a bad thing either."

"No. Well. The lesson didn't seem to take with regard to you anyway." Mycroft let his fingers skim gently over the keys. "I remember when I first told him that, told him that caring is not an advantage. I was sent to boarding school at thirteen. I was excited to go, despite worrying about leaving Sherlock alone. I told myself the boys would be more intelligent, more mature, I might even make a friend. And even if I didn't, at last the masters might know more than I already did. I looked forward to finally being challenged."

Mycroft looked down bleakly at the piano keys for a long moment, before finally continuing. "It didn't work out that way. The boys were as stupid as ever, but far more arrogant thanks to their background. Only a handful of masters were worth my time. A few of them were prepared to give me extra attention. But in those days eager boys hoping for private tutoring were supposed to give something back. A little _prid pro quo_."

He carefully ignored the anger he could see on John's face, a face always honest in its emotions in a way neither he nor Sherlock had ever been able to be. "I came home after my first term unhappier than I'd ever been. For years I'd been promising myself boarding school as the point when it would begin to get better. Now I found it could get considerably worse and I had years of it ahead of me." Mycroft found the words were beginning to tumble out of him, running ahead of his conscious control, as if John's presence and Sherlock's music had unexpectedly cracked open a long-sealed door. 

"I was lonely and homesick and desperate to see Sherlock. But when I returned to the house, he was so angry with me for leaving him, he alternated between refusing to speak to me for days on end, or ragging me relentlessly about my burgeoning weight and my stuffy ways."

Mycroft closed his eyes and spoke down to the piano. There were very few people who really mattered to him, mattered as individuals rather than simply as statistics in a plan for the greater good. Sherlock and John - for all he had done for Sherlock - were in that exclusive group, and he had failed both of them. Giving up this secret that he'd never told was the closest he could come to asking for their understanding. 

"And then one evening, quite unexpectedly, Sherlock crawled into my bed in the middle of the night, crawled into my arms crying about how much he loathed prep school, how they all hated him, how he was a freak who'd never have any friends. All I could think was how much worse it was going to be for him once he got to boarding school. When I told him that caring was not an advantage I was trying to protect him. But more than anything, I was trying to convince myself. 

"At least Sherlock had an older brother he could go to to cry. I had, well..." Mycroft found himself blinking down at the keys that appeared oddly blurred below him. He took a deep breath. There was only so much of this he could take. "Well, that is quite enough maudlin sentiment about things that happened thirty years ago." 

He rose from the piano seat. "John, its--"

John, like the well-bred Englishman that he was, took the cue immediately. "I must be going, thank you for your time and for the music, it was very generous of you. I'll show myself out." He hesitated in his rush for the door, continuing rather more tentatively. "Although if you, you know, ever wanted to do this again," John waved towards the piano. "I'd like that."

Mycroft nodded. 

He sat in silence for a long while, staring down at his fingers resting on the keys, listening to the sound of John's footsteps fade away, to the distant echo of a closing door. He felt terribly tired. At last the waiting became more than he could bear.

"Well," he said finally, "aren't you going to tell me in scathing detail just how abysmally I desecrated your composition?" He didn't really expect an answer. Doubtless this would be simply be added to the thousand things that they both pretended had never happened. 

"Your first performance was indeed a travesty, as you well know."

Mycroft did not look up as footsteps sounded across the floor, coming to a stop behind him. A long arm reached over his shoulder and plucked the sheets from the music stand. "However, your subsequent attempts were..." Sherlock hesitated for a long moment. Mycroft could hear him shuffling through the various pages of music. "They were surprisingly adequate." 

Mycroft looked round in surprise. Sherlock was deep in thought, staring at his score. "I would not have thought that a piano had anything to add to this particular endeavour, but I may be mistaken." Sherlock tapped the pages against his lips as he stared into the distance, eyes unfocused. "Hmmm, yes! I need tea. And my violin. Now."

And with that Sherlock sprawled himself on the small sofa, spread the pages around him and began to scribble on the first one.

"I'm not--" Mycroft began automatically, and then bit off the sentence. _Surprisingly adequate_ was not a small concession, particularly in these fraught circumstances. "Very well, just this once." He left Sherlock to his scribbling and stood in the kitchen staring unseeing out of the window for far longer than it took the kettle to boil. 

Eventually he returned with the violin and the tea. In a concession to Sherlock's bohemian ways, the tea was in mugs. In a concession to his own, the mugs were of the finest bone china.

"Work through this," demanded Sherlock, trusting several pages at him, before taking up his violin and becoming lost once more in picking out odd fragments of melody. Mycroft sat on the piano stool and read through the score. To his surprise he found Sherlock had taken his original piece and rewritten it for two instruments. Nor had he relegated the piano to a mere supporting role, a dull foil designed only to showcase the brilliance of the other instrument. 

He'd kept the most soaring of his flights of fancy for the violin, the elements that Mycroft had struggled to play. Here was the wild sea bird gliding high over the ocean, riding the currents of the wind, cork-screwing recklessly down towards a watery grave and then pulling away at the last moment to twist back into the vast heavens. But there were passages where the violin stood back to let the piano lead, where the music surged with the roll of the great ocean waves, vast power hidden below the surface, only hinted at by the line of breakers. And there were times where the two instruments worked together, a teasing test of wills, the sea bird skimming the spray of the surf, the waves whipped up by the same winds in which the bird played. 

Mycroft read through it faster than Sherlock could rewrite the score and he began to quietly finger his passages on the piano, first following the music and then idly playing with variations as he waited. "That! Again," demanded Sherlock on occasion, and when Mycroft received further pages of music, he saw with surprise that his variations had been incorporated as the piece returned time and again to its underlying themes.

"Now, we play," ordered Sherlock.

It was not an experience for the fainthearted. Sherlock composed for two as he always had for one, by experimenting with different passages, changing tiny details, jumping back and forth through the far more detailed score that only existed in his head. It was a confusing process for Mycroft to follow, and was not helped by Sherlock's scathing criticism of his performance. It was only made tolerable by a certain detachment in Sherlock's voice, he was criticising the music as it failed in life to live up to his imagination, and he was as rude about his own attempts as he was about Mycroft's. 

But eventually he had a score he was reasonably happy with and he allowed them to play it through start to end. A storm swept over a restless ocean, a bird defied the tempest to the point almost of losing its own life, the chaos eased, a ray of sunshine broke through the glowering clouds, the spray leapt up to tickle at the wings of the bird.

Both men soaked up the silence once they reached the end. 

"It's still not right," muttered Sherlock eventually, "I need to--"

"Later, Sherlock," said Mycroft gently. "You can't make it right all at once. We've been at this for hours, and there are other things that still demand our attention. But maybe--" He hesitated, and then continued carefully. "Maybe we can work on it again?"

Sherlock grunted something that might have been assent as he swept up his violin and the score and walked out of the room. He stopped at the door, not looking back as he spoke. "And maybe, when all this is finally over, we can play it for John?"

Mycroft, still seated at the piano, smiled down at his hands which now rested on the closed key cover. "I think he'd like that." He continued softly, speaking now just to the piano. "I know I'd like that."

\- THE END -

**Author's Note:**

> I know nothing about playing instruments or writing music, so I apologize if any of this makes those readers who do know such things roll their eyes or wince.


End file.
